Instead of holding a show, this season, Vivienne Westwood shot a video. The 2-minute, 46-second film is to be released today across every digital platform the company can muster. On YouTube, it’s here.
Watch it and you’ll see lots of studiedly disarrayed street-cast models gamboling around a studio and the London neighborhood of Parsons Green, discussing the empowering nature of clothes, muttering about being recruits to the Westwood “army,” and flirting. Dame Vivienne explains that the collection “has got a theme of war running through it” and mentions a set of prayer flag playing cards she has designed and printed “to save the whole world.” The hashtag #Don’tGetKilled seems like reasonable advice. Unlike Andreas Kronthaler’s collection for Westwood, which shows in Paris and aims to be experimental, this line reiterates many of Westwood’s magnificent core motifs in a seasonally specific tone. This season, the tone was military.
In the Westwood showroom on Conduit Street, the real stars of Westwood’s film lined the room. Painted woodland camo print, blown up, was used on shirts, and jackets were overprinted with broken up letters from the adage “sow the whirlwind, reap the whirlwind.” A green-on-beige check based on a garment worn by a childhood soft toy of Westwood’s was recruited as a broadly interpreted camouflage in full-shouldered, slant-pocketed coats. Suits featured the dark brown and green stripes worn by Moroccan colonial Goumier regiments, and sweats came in a dusky Mountbatten pink devised to camouflage warships on the sun-touched horizon. There were Westwood-y riffs on baggy demob suits and an eye-popping woven dogstooth and Prince of Wales mix coat. The tailoring jostled with raffishly regimental details: frogging, braiding, some golden oak leaves at a lapel.
Across the showroom, much of the womenswear echoed the fabrication of the men’s. Exceptions included full-leg pants teamed with asymmetrical jackets and corsets in an orange-touched, purportedly military red and a rich green. These came in a satin viscose blended with nettle and were evening cousins to their Mountbatten pink day equivalents in hemp. Although it’s sad no physical manifestation of Westwood will grace London this season, this movie-led maneuver seems well worth a sortie.
